The new Apple laptops look great; I’m pretty sure we’re going to get one. The CPUs should be plenty powerful enough, they have more than enough hard drive to keep me happy, the graphics card is better than I expected (I think; I have to look into its details).

I’ll probably wait three or so months, to give the chip switch a little bit of time to settle down. And I’m still planning to pair it with an Ultra 20; I should ask around at work to see if we’re planning a speed bump on those soon, since they have been out for a while now.

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They do look great. The other thing making me hesistant is the lack of accidental damage as part of AppleCare, where Dell covers everything you can do to it. (In their own words, they’ll replace the TFT unless it has hammer marks on it.)

This sounds like no big deal, but it’s probably not clear how clumsy my wife and I are. For her one and a quarter year-old PowerBook:

TFT broke, after having a large desk fan fall on it after the desk fan’s cable was tripped on. Cost: $800 for new TFT.
DVD drive gradually broke over a few months, stopping reading discs, after the laptop fell a foot or two off the sofa. Cost: About $300 for a new drive, but we haven’t bothered.
TFT hinge is bent back, after, um, I dropped the laptop over Christmas. Everything still works, but closing the lid no longer catches and sends the machine to sleep. Cost: Again, I think we’d be looking at around $300, but there’s not much point doing that without doing the DVD drive as well, and..

So, don’t get me wrong, I know this is a vicious amount of clumsiness for just a year, but it’s looking like the PowerBook is costing us.. $2500 for the laptop, plus $1400/year in damage! Clearly, the answer is to take better care of it, but it seems a no-brainer for us to go with a Dell instead, and pay $1500 for the laptop and a few hundred for two or three years of accidental damage cover.

> the graphics card is better than I expected (I think; I have to look into its details).

It’s one of the new ATI cards with their “Avivo” engine, which is, sadly, entirely unsupported by Linux — both using the Xorg drivers and ATI’s own proprietary ones! ATI had always made specs available (at least under NDA) before this card, but no longer. The popular conspiracy theory is that it’s related to the card having won the contract for the Xbox 360’s graphics, with Microsoft asking them to stop giving out specs.

So, I don’t see how I can ethically buy an ATI card right now; these cards are going to be all over the place, in laptops and desktops, and it’s completely unacceptible that we have to shrug if someone wants to use Linux with them. The reverse engineering on them isn’t going well — unlike previous cards where you can get 2D modes simply by setting the right registers and knowing video memory locations (but getting accelerated 3D requires much more work), the Avivo chip treats 2D as a subset of 3D, and we’d need to implement the 3D engine to get X working. I think this is probably the largest hurdle Linux has this year, but very few people seem to be aware of it. (end rant)

> Iâ€™m still planning to pair it with an Ultra 20; I should ask around at work to see if weâ€™re planning a speed bump on those soon, since they have been out for a while now.